iMusician Subscription Model - Let's talk

[SimonG]

Background to the change

iMusician have had the same model, and the same prices for 15 years. A lot has changed in that time and we wanted to build a new model that would work for the future of music and musicians, so why did we end up where we are… well, there are a lot of reasons and they are listed below, in detail!

This is a long post - a reminder that you can translate to your own language by following these steps

Return on (your) Investment?

The biggest risk to us was not changing and - any risk for iMusician is a risk for our customers, to whom we promised to keep their music online forever and we take this seriously
.
The most important things to us was a key statistic that we became aware of - a large (too large) number of our customers don’t make back the money from releasing (not just with us, but with any distributor). Our previous model (with Rockstar, Regular etc) was released ~13 years ago, when shops were paying a LOT more per stream (Examples from 2015, 2017 ). Over the years we have just been seeing this reduce and reduce and I don’t think it will get better anytime soon.

So we asked ourselves: What can we do to improve things for independent artists? The answer - more features, more promotion tools, more revenue opportunities and more data. All of these things cost (development time, storage, security etc etc). so we’re faced with either increasing the price for releasing in order to cover this OR splitting it out - if you want the high level services you can opt-in for them and, at the same time, we can reduce the cost to release for those that just want releasing.

Fraud is growing (and it is costing everyone).

The second thing to note is the rise (and rise) of fraud in music. This is not just about people stealing copyrights and fake streams but also organised criminal gangs and even money laundering. The response of almost all of the shops has been simple: blame the distributor and remove tracks, usually without notifying anyone until it is done.

So, then we have additional work to do in tracking and removing fraud before it happens (and dealing with the fallout of having to ensure that payments are not going to organised crime organisations etc).

Sidenote: Music fraud costs everyone. Every cent earned by fraudsters (aka criminals) is a cent lost from genuine hard-working independent musicians and it’s f___ing sh_t that the organisations that can do the most about it are the ones doing the least (aka just removing anything suspicious and passing on zero information to anyone).

Fighting for independent musicians for 20+ Years

Since it’s inception in a “windlowless attic somewhere in Switzerland” the founders of iMusician have been fighting for independent musicians. iMusician are a major reason why any independent musician, and not just artists from one of the big labels, can be counted in the charts in Europe and we’re not going to stop fighting for independent musicians.

Playlists

We have recently started to invest more into growing our playlist, naturally we feature more of our own artists (although everyone is free to submit to the playlists) and we will be spending actual money on gaining followers to these playlists so that our artists can make more money.

The New Subscription Model

I will deal with just our model here, comparison with competitors is below (we know we don’t operate in a vacuum).

Reducing the cost to release

Our main aim was to reduce the cost of releasing. Yes, some shops were moved to subscription only (because they require additional manual work / checks). but we wanted to ensure that we were still able to offer a level of releasing to the shops that most people wanted for a much reduced price, if you want access to additional features then you can subscribe - even if just for 1 month - and then when you unsubscribe, your track stays online forever, with the features from the subscription (except the commission).

Did we get the price / shop mix right? - we’re still listening to feedback and we are engaged in conversations with customers and shops to try to improve this.

More power, more control, more money.

On top of that we are working on making your releases more powerful, how? By creating better promotion tools. We started with “Artist Hub” (aka release pages) and will soon be releasing our new Artist Pages that will bring together all of your releases.

Our future plans here will be to enable you to make money from your fans, directly. And I won’t give away more than that.

Sidenote: We’re not great at talking about our future plans, we might sound paranoid but we know our competitors are here on the community and in our email lists so we’re trying to not give away every single future plan before we get there because, yes - we are a smaller company and we are slower (currently) than others to get tech releases out. (hey, there! We see you , come say hi! )

Commission

Yep, it is a hot and contentious topic in the music industry and we admit it too, we’re not a fan of commissions. However, let’s put it a different way.

Distrokid and Tunecore will take your music down from the shops if you stop paying them. This basically makes their offering a commission (if you think about it). You pay $19.99 (minimum) per year, whether you release or not. That means you need at least 84,029 streams (at the 2021 Spotify payout rate) otherwise iMusician’s 10% commission will be cheaper and your entire catalog won’t be taken down if your payment card fails.

So why charge a commission in the first place?
The commissions are there to cover other costs we have (the €9 release fee goes to the humans and robots that check your release can stay online, and we are genuinely working to reduce this even further ) so then the commission goes to managing payouts / storing tracks (we keep the original track in case new shops appear) / managing your music if shops take it down / etc.

Competitors - do we stack up?

We agree that our offering is different to other competitors, and this makes it a lot harder to compare. Trying to compare us is made even harder by the hidden fees that other distributors don’t talk about…

Distrokid:

• $19.99 per year or they will take your music down
• $29 per single / $49 per album to keep your track online only if you die or your payment card fails
  • So to get the same as iMusician, you are paying both your subscription for your lifetime and 30 dollars ON TOP!
• $0.99 per song per year to be on extra discovery platforms that can identify your song (like Shazam) (included with Apple Music with iMusician).
• $7.95 per album per year to be added to new stores that they get a partnership with, after your release.
• You don’t get in the YouTube Content ID for free, $4.95 per single or $14.95 per album, per year. On top of that they take a 20% cut of your YouTube Ad revenue.

Tunecore:

• $14.99 per year or they will take your music down
• 20% commission on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram revenues.
• Otherwise, I’ll admit - they’re pretty okay.

CDBaby

• $9 per release and 9% commission on everything and there’s no way to cap or reduce it.
• 40% comission on YouTube Creator Music sync

Additional Services

With most of these services, they have separate companies to do promotional tools so that they get “2 bites of the cherry”.

For example:

• CDBaby’s HearNow is $24.00 a year - iMusician’s Artist Hub is free and does the same thing.
• Linkfire itself is $119 per year or covered with adverts on the free version.
• Distrokid’s Hyperfollow is free and not a bad option (happy to admit we can be better at things).

Also - here is the source of most of my information

A Global Advantage?

Ok, so Switzerland is a tiny country that is pretty unique in the world (and not just for it’s chocolate, cows and mountains).

Witholding tax

It’s not a popular topic, but trying to get money out of the USA is hard. Especially when it comes to music royalties, you’ll either have to fill in the exciting W-8ECI form if you’re lucky and your country has an agreement with the USA otherwise you’ll basically have to pay the 30% witholding tax Think of it as 30% commission… (Distrokid, CDBaby)

In great news for iMusician customers, Switzerland charges no witholding tax on any royalties, anywhere, globally. So for most of you, you can get 30% more money. Bonus.

If you got this far drop me a in the comments and a on the post

Foreign currency fees.

We know we don’t have every currency available (yet) but by having more than just US dollar available we hope we can reduce those annoying banking fees for foreign currencies.

We also use Wise for most of our payouts (outside of ) to give you the best currency exchange rate possible (as far as we could find)… meaning more money for you (again).

These are just two small (but very important) operational things that I hope show our determination to do the right thing by our customers.

Support & Communication post launch

OK, so here are two things we didn’t get completely right.

Communication

As CMO, I gotta take some responsibility here for how the launch was communicated and… we learnt A LOT… we won’t make huge huge changes to iMusician overnight again. We know it f__ks with your release plans and we don’t want to do that, so… yup, happy to take the blame for that, from now on our focus is on adding more “things” and not doing a wholesale change overnight.

Support

So changing our support to be community based seems to have most people think it will get worse and I am hoping this isn’t the case. It wasn’t designed for this, we had hoped that it would allow musicians to help musicians (and we can see cases where this has worked, most recently thanks to @cantheproducer).

We’ll continue to try to improve how we offer support and what we do here. We have 2x updates that are already in the pipeline including automating updates and the ability to change email addresses on accounts without having to come through support, that should help some of the most common threads here.

You matter to us.

Really. It’s true. but, we really won’t bring back the old offerings, so where do go for the future? Let’s have a constructive discussion: what can iMusician provide you that would make your life as a musician better?

Happy to have a good conversation with you

[minizool]

Good summary of the situation.
For me I can finally admit that the commission is not so important (90% of 10 EUR is better than 100% of 8 EUR ).
That’s why I prefer to have a release on all platforms for 10% commission (or even 20%) instead of a release on 4 platforms with 0%.
Probably a lot of musicians prefer a large number of platforms like me ?
That’s why I will probably take a 1 month Amplify+ when I’m ready to release and than switch to free after one month.

[SimonG]

Thanks for your response @minizool

And we get that people will do this (subscribe and then drop off) and really our aim is to provide enough value through the subscription (new features, more opportunities etc) that you will stay subscribed.

By doing this we have focused ourselves on you, the customer, and we are trying to partner ourselves with you, to make you more successful by providing features you need

I hope this makes sense

[zirnoise]

Hi @SimonG,

Seems reasonable.

Everything is going up in price these days. Some companies are even starting to have some questionable practices. (See the Waves fiasco).
So thanks for remaining transparent and for keeping the communication open!

I have a couple of questions. Maybe you touched the subjects and I didn’t catch them, so sorry in advance.

• What happens with old releases? As an example, I bought the Rockstar tier for my first release. All the features bought then remain the same? (0% commission, Content ID, all shops etc.?)

• So, if I understand correctly. If I upgrade my subscription to amplify+ for a month and release a Single/Album, all the features remain the same after I revert to a free subscription? So the release remains on all shops? I still get email support for that release?
  The only change is that the release will have a 10% commission, as long as I have a free sub, right?

I also have some questions regarding the Amplify+ sub, where should I post them, here or on another topic?

Thank you!

P.S.:

[SimonG]

Hey @zirnoise

Regarding your questions:

1. Old releases (Rockstar Regaular etc) remain exactly as they were, with 0% commission for Rockstar, with ContentID, with all shops etc. Maybe it is easier to clarify that the only thing that changed is support.

2. You are correct again here. Subscribe > Release > everything stays as it was at the point of purchase except commission and support.

You can post your questions in “Ask a Question” ( I just don’t want them getting lost in here!)

[zirnoise]

Great.

Thank you Simon!

[minizool]

Yesterday i was thinking about something.
Could it be a good idea to have a “Free+” offer ? (release at same price of other subscriptions - to all shops incl. premium - 20% commission).
I wonder if it could be interesting for both sides (musicians + iMusician) or useless.

[SimonG]

Interesting thoughts - we are hearing that the free tier could be improved and will definitely put some thoughts towards this I’ll tag @Susann as she collects our research

[eriahummingbird]

Thanks for this message. I got to say that it reassures me to know that we still have ways to communicate with members of the iMusician team.
And yes, never do that again, changing things all of a sudden without warning us before

[SimonG]

Hey @eriahummingbird

You can rest assured that we have no plans to change our current model. The only thing we’re looking to do is to add more value (for you) to our platform and subscriptions.

[Beatnok]

I was happy to find this thread - I’ve released a few things through iMusician. What originally attracted me to this service vs the others was the fact that keeping things up did not require continued payment, and being able to set up a label on Beatport (more on this last point later) The idea that I would still have to be paying a fee in 20+ years or my work would disappear was a huge bummer. So when I came back to release my latest work and found everything to be different, I was bit surprised.

What is true across all genres is that the majority of people are not purchasing digital music, and those that do stream are continually returning to music they know rather than discovering new music IE a smaller and smaller number of (major label) artists are garnering more and more of the streams. Bandcamp has emerged as potential fix to this. It’s where I do the most sales, it’s where my supporters support me, and it’s where I make the most money. Traditional digital distribution is more compulsory than voluntary. I do it for convenience (so people can stream my music) and to cast the widest net possible. It’s not a place to make money, and is barely a place to build an audience (for most - many artists in the pop-sphere have made careers started on streaming before moving into touring)

As someone working in electronic music, a few places are still relevant - Beatport, Traxsource, and Juno are all stores where DJ’s and discerning listeners shop for music, and Shazam is an important discovery tool that is well used to identify music being played by a DJ in a club setting. I would say it’s mandatory (in electronic music) to be in those shops, in particular. To put all of those behind a subscription is a huge bummer. I am fortunate that I was able to set my label up during the previous paradigm.

Considering all of that, I would love to see the stores and services removed from the paywall. I think a fair trade off would be increased commission - 30% or more is not unreasonable (re:people not buying). As I mentioned, Bandcamp is my main interface, so I dont have a huge need for the promo tools, the playlisting services, or the branding tools. With those being true career-building services provided to people, it’s very reasonable that those would be part of an additional paid service from iMusician.

Everybody is different. In Pop, RnB, etc, singles are popular. This model makes sense if you are going to drop a single song most of the time. Where it doesn’t make sense is releasing 3 or 4 EP’s a year. In that case, my guess is that you will find many subscribing for a month, then unsubscribing. Obviously that’s not the goal (you want people to stay), but accessing some of the few places where people still buy music necessitates it.

[SimonG]

Hey @Beatnok

Thanks for taking the time to give your detailed and valuable feedback, I too am glad that you found this post!

I hear your thoughts about Bandcamp, and it is genuinely interesting to hear that this is where you make most of your revenue and gain fans. We had our suspicions that this would be the case but it’s nice to hear it confirmed from an artist.

I genuinely didn’t realize that Shazam was such a big help to getting fans, do you see any regional or country based trends here?

We’ll take in your feedback as we work to improve and I do hear you on putting the valuable shops behind a paywall… It wasn’t done because the shops were valuable but because they require manual work from us in many cases (manual work = cost unfortunately). We’ll continue to work on this though as I also understand that some artists are sub / unsub/ resub etc.

I wish you a Happy Easter if you celebrate it and I invite you also to submit to our Community Playlist

thanks again for your time, feedback and for being an iMusician member!

[60tonsofmelody]

To whom it my concern,

We are about to launch : 60 Tones of melody and Mertinhouse records, based in Melbourne, AU.

After a long research, we are left with two main Music distributor to choose as our starting point.

We are here to contact you today, to have more information and clarification in regards the following points:

is there a sync package to promo to the likes of Netflix and industry companies that my look for music for film et ?

will it be separate the sign up 60 Tones of Melody from the Label :Mertinhouse Records?

Can we pick the releasing/ publishing dates?

Can I have more info about Royalties ? I know that some distributors don’t offer this service and I would have to pay someone else like Song trust

is there any promotional help at start up?

Monetization of online to any type of site or platforms like Sound Cloud…and YouTube et how does this work ?

I have been researching your website and I have also been watching online reviews in regards the fees, however are there’re hidden fees ? on the amplify plus subscription ?

is there someone that can contact me for a quick Q&A on these subjects before i have to purchase the subscription i am very keen to link up with i Musician and i would love to have a smooth running an understanding before kicking off as we intend to have multiple acts on one label as well as the launch of our recent projects 60Tons of melody this will involve different genres so we would like to be across it all … many many thanks 111 Mertonhouse

[60tonsofmelody]

To whom it my concern,

We are about to launch : 60 Tones of melody and Mertinhouse records, based in Melbourne, AU.

After a long research, we are left with two main Music distributor to choose as our starting point.

We are here to contact you today, to have more information and clarification in regards the following points:

• is there a sync package to promo to the likes of Netflix and industry companies that my look for music for film et ?

• will it be separate the sign up 60 Tones of Melody from the Label :Mertinhouse Records?

• Can we pick the releasing/ publishing dates?

• Can I have more info about Royalties ? I know that some distributors don’t offer this service and I would have to pay someone else like Song trust

• is there any promotional help at start up?

• Monetization of online to any type of site or platforms like Sound Cloud…and YouTube et how does this work ?

• I have been researching your website and I have also been watching online reviews in regards the fees, however are there’re hidden fees ? on the amplify plus subscription ?

• is there someone that can contact me for a quick Q&A on these subjects before i have to purchase the subscription i am very keen to link up with i Musician and i would love to have a smooth running an understanding before kicking off as we intend to have multiple acts on one label as well as the launch of our recent projects 60Tons of melody this will involve different genres so we would like to be across it all … many many thanks 111 Mertonhouse

[60tonsofmelody]

hi can you explain if there is any way to have help or promotion with sync to places like netflix for companies looking for music for film et scores , like the facility offered by Gyrostream , i agree iMusician is one of the best value for money companies but there are a couple of services i would like to know about before subscribing . like promotion to playlist on certain music streaming sites also many thanks

[Maurizio]

Hi there @60tonsofmelody,

tagging my colleague @Pauline here, who will get back to you soon

[Pauline]

Hello there!

Thanks a lot for your interest in iMusician and your questions! Here is some info:

• For now, we don’t have any synchronisation tool - but it’s something we’re currently discussing for the future!

• Regarding the sign up of Mertinhouse Records, it’s up to you! You can create another iMusician account (linked to another email address) or distribute your releases under the 60 Tones of Melody account, using the label name Mertinhouse records for the releases of your choice (the label name is added at the 1st step of each new release, so you can choose.)

• You can absolutely pick the digital release date - with our plans AMPLIFY and AMPLIFY+

• About your royalties: we collect them as soon as we receive it from the shops, and you can request a payout whenever you want, with no minimal amount. Please note that sales revenue for a release is only made available by the shops 4 months after sales occur (because the shops need around 3 months to do some checks and send us your sales, then we need 1 month to allocate your sales on your account. But you can check your Trends as early as a few days after your release is live, to have a first idea about how your release is performing. Check this article to know more about Music Analytics: What is the difference between trends and sales?).

• If your question is about getting a discount from iMusician, this can be discussed we would be happy to help you getting started as soon as we know a bit more about your project.

• We do offer the monetization of your tracks on YouTube, with Youtube Content ID. More info here: YouTube Monetization with Content ID and How can I Monetize my Music with Youtube Content ID)

• There is no hidden fees. The only additional fees that could occur are if you need a release to be delivered in a specifically short time (from 2 working days - 40 EUR - to 1 week - 20 EUR). But all normal delivery is free, so if the release is planned and uploaded early enough, no additional fee should be applied.

• During the upload on your releases on the iMusician App, you can let us know if you want to pitch your release to the online shops. We then make sure to deliver your release early enough so you can pitch on Spotify, Deezer, Amazon. And you can always propose your tracks to our iMusician playlists!

• I am there to answer any of your questions. I would also love to know a little more about the 60 Tones of melody and Mertinhouse records project, so I’m sending you a DM to continue this conversation!

Cheers!

[GPP]

Dear SimonG,

Thank you for the clarification. It was at the very least confusing not knowing how this new model affects old releases deals. After doing some research and finding this conversation I realised we missed iMusician’s email notification sent to us around January 10th addressing this change.

I sincerely hope your loyal customers don’t migrate to other platforms because of the lack of understanding of what is clearly a great change and in good faith. I am so glad we found this post as it reassures we are with the best online distributor. I love this video you guys posted: How iMusician Works: FOREVER ONLINE Music Distribution - YouTube but I would recommend iMusician to make another video (if it doesn’t exist) in an effort to reach out to all old customers with old releases in the old plans explaining in detail what happens to their old releases.

I believe we just released on Rockstart plan and your clarification “the only thing that changed is support” I find it very simple and reasonable. We just subscribed to Amplify+ and are hoping this motivates us to release more music more often.

Thank You,

GPP